When I was about 9 years old, I read just about every book of fairy tales in the library. 398.2 in the Dewey decimal system, I remember it well.

I also remember reading The Scarlet Pimpernel when I was about 15 and telling my mom how cool it was, and she said she really liked it too, she read it back when she was about 10. That kinda pulled the rug out from under me–not my mother’s intention, I’m sure–since I was always the one who was supposed to do things at an early age (perhaps the product of being the fourth child). Anyway, after going through the fairy tales section I made my way to science fiction, starting with Asimov etc. and then reading whatever else was on the library shelves.

At some point (maybe age 15 or so) I came across Barry Malzberg, who wrote stories in a perverse sort of barely readable formula which, if unpublished, would be hard to take seriously but because in print was somehow compelling. Either important, must-read stuff or despair squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube, who knows. At some point it becomes easier to read about this stuff than to read it directly, which has led me, decades later, to subscribe to the New York Review of Books instead of reaching for the latest Richard Ford, etc. Malzberg wrote a compellingly despairing memoir-like book of criticism which I bought when it came out around 1982. Right now, the segment of Engines of the Night that moves me the most is the surely-manipulative-but-in-this-case-it’s-gotta-be-ok “Cornell George Holey Woolrich: December 1903 to September 1968,” but the theme of Malzberg’s less dramatic struggles with commercial realities is compelling enough, and was so at the time also, despite my own continuing lucky separation from any financial needs.

I recently looked up Malzberg on Amazon and found he’d recently published Breakfast in the Ruins, an expansion of Engines of the Night. (Great titles.) I ordered the new book and read it through. He has tics in his writing, we all do, but it flows much better than his fiction, or maybe it’s just that I’m less interested in reading about spacement than about about middle-class, middle-aged literary life. Malzberg’s absolute lack of smugness (but not lack of self-regard) endlessly invigorates. (But it’s funny to read of his frustration about being ignored by the Alfred Kazins of the world, after reading of Kazin’s own frustrations about keeping his untidy life going while trying to get by as a book reviewer.)

The reason I recently looked up Malzberg–I’d liked (actually, enjoyed, although this doesn’t quite seem like the nice thing to say) Engines of the Night but hadn’t thought much about it in recent years–was that I’d recently read a dismissive piece on it in a collection of essays and reviews by Thomas Disch. Disch is another one: some of his stories are excellent (in particular, Casablanca is simultaneously poignant and nasty) and the poems are delightfully readable (my favorite, of course, is The Joycelyn Schrader Story), but what really reads like candy to me is his criticism. Especially his poetry criticism, where he mocks and mocks and mocks these poets who can’t get a real job and also throws in some judicious comments on those rare poets who have something interesting to say. Anyway, I recently from some source (probably Amazon again) learned that Disch had recently published two new books of criticism, one on poetry and one on science fiction–these were miscellaneous collections, not crafted work, but still, one takes what one can, and so I ordered them immediately and quickly wolfed them down when they did arrive. (To be more precise, a combination of almost no free time and a little bit of restraint allowed me to stretch these out for a month or so.) They were indeed treats and I thought I’d do everyone (or a few people) a favor by blogging on them, so I looked up Thomas Disch on the web, only to find that he had died . . . two days earlier. Shot himself, which is just hard for me to picture given his jaunty writing persona available from his essays as well as from his most famous story, The Brave Little Toaster. So, no blog entry then, but in the meantime I’d ordered the Malzberg book, which I’ve just finished reading, having no discipline to revise my multiple comparisons paper on this train ride.

Stories are supposed to begin in the middle but end at the end, but somehow I’ve done a Pulp Fiction here and ended in the middle. Maybe I’ll go and reread Overlay or one of the others and see if there’s something there that I’d missed.

P.S. Phil tells me that he recently reread Ubik (which we read when we were about 20) and says that he was amazed at how sloppy it is. Somehow, sloppiness seems more objectionable in a book than in a movie, perhaps because it is clearer how it all could be fixed. At the same time, some of what I see as the key moments in Ubik–for example, Runciter’s annoyance that he has to waste time in small talk when he’s trying to get advice from his dead wife–I could see these moments disappearing if the writing became too smooth.